The two eggs in the foreground of the photo above are made by a different method than those on other pages of this website. They are made in the manner of gerdany, those intricately woven bead necklaces common in Ukraine.

Using only a needle, beads, thread and her skill, the craftswoman fashions a brightly patterned design from beads. It is slipped over an egg, wooden or real, and then the latticework tightened and tied. The result is a technicolor beaded coat for a plain, ordinary egg.

Above: Details from traditional gerdany

(L’viv Ethnographic Museum collection)

Above: Detail from woven beadwork egg

(brown eggshell under beadwork)

Below are a few examples of this style of beaded egg. If you look closely, you can see the brown chicken egg under the beads in several of them – and the irregular shape of one due to the egg being slightly crushed in transit (that’s how I realized that these were real eggs and not wooden or plastic molds).